He stopped. The rest had restored his color and slowed his breathing, but I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.
“If you can’t trust me, whom can you trust?” I asked. “You found traces of the harbor installations, I suppose. What’s so unbelievable about that? I don’t see why you couldn’t tell the antiquities people; they might have given you permission to dive, or even supplied money and equipment. You shouldn’t be so damn suspicious of-”
I stopped speaking, because he was shaking his head violently.
“You little fool, what do you know about life? Especially my life! This is a cutthroat world, and I have been persecuted more cruelly than most men. Five years ago my career was over. My enemies controlled Greece; not only was I unable to dig, but my very life was in danger. It was a miracle, nothing less, that Mistropolous should have become head of the antiquities department; he is probably the only man in my field who still has some regard for me and my ideas. But he is only one man, and his own position is precarious. If it were known that I had made this discovery, a discovery so astounding, so unprecedented-”
“Okay, okay,” I said, in some alarm. “I get your point. But I don’t see why a breakwater or a couple of warehouses should be such a-”
He laughed. I think it was the first time I had ever heard him laugh, and if this was a representative sample I knew I wasn’t looking forward to hearing it again.
“Don’t be so stupid,” he said. “Think. You know what happened here in the fifteenth century B.C. on a spring day, when the wind was blowing from the northwest.”
It was an unexpectedly poetic phrase for him to use. His voice softened and his face became calm, brooding. There was a far-off look in his eyes. I felt as if I were hearing an eyewitness account of the event.
“There had been signs of the displeasure of the gods. The cloud of fiery gas by night, the pillar of smoke by day, and the rumbling roar of the bull god, Poseidon, the Earthshaker. But these things had happened before. Some fled; most remained, making their ineffectual sacrifices, and hoping… When the cataclysm occurred, it caughtthem all-women tending their children, the men in the fields, priests in the shrines…”
His voice rose. “And what else? What else, in a harbor town, a mercantile shipping center?”
His eyes bored into me. They were perfectly sane. He was excited, but he wasn’t crazy. I knew what he was driving at. But-
“It’s impossible,” I said.
“Ships!” He slammed his fist against the rock. “Minoan ships, the trading fleet of the sea king himself. They are there, in the water, where they sank over three thousand years ago.”
Chapter 4
UP AND DOWN, UP AND DOWN, THE WAVES ROCKED ME. I was hypnotized by the motion, the warm caress of the water, and the mesmerizing gaze of this maniac who happened to be my father.
“Now just one minute,” I said, getting a grip on myself; for a moment the picture had dazzled me. “Your reasoning is excellent. Sure, there were ships. Some of them must have sunk. But no ship could survive underwater all that time. Oh, I know about the wrecks of Greek and Roman ships; quite a few of them have been located. But they date from a hundred A.D. or a hundred B.C. You’re talking about fifteen hundred B.C. Almost thirty-five hundred years ago.”
“A ship could survive that long. It has. At Cape Gelidonya, in Turkey. That wreck was investigated in 1960. It has been dated to approximately the fifteenth century before Christ. Not only was the cargo found, but even the planks of the ship’s hull.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. But I knew he wasn’t. He wouldn’t joke about anything as important as this. In fact, I had never heard him joke about anything.
“No.”
“Okay, it could happen. But how do you know it happened here? I mean, what exactly did you find?” And then, as he hesitated, I said impatiently, “Look, I know what a couple of hundred years can do to the wreckage of a ship. Nothing survives unchanged-except gold. Timber rots and is eaten by worms, metal corrodes. Even pottery would be changed by marine accretions, or by electrolysis from the elements in the clay. And it’s easy to be deceived. Rocks look like ballast, and natural formations can imitate straight-line, man-made shapes.”
For the first time since I had known him he looked at me with something like respect.
“Essentially you are correct,” he said. “Although pottery is not altered as much as you suggest. There are pots here. They are amphorae, vessels containing material meant for export. A heap of such jars almost always indicates an ancient wreck. But that is not all. The ships themselves are there.”
I was silent. If anyone but Frederick had told me such a yarn I wouldn’t have believed him. I don’t know why I believed Frederick. Maybe it was because I just didn’t expect his insanity to take this particular form. Paranoia was his problem, not fantasy. If I ever lost my mind, this was the kind of beautiful madness I would create.
“An entire fleet must have been in the harbor,” he went on. “Ash had been falling for hours, perhaps for days; the sky was black as night, poisonous fumes made breathing difficult. The rulers of Thera reached a decision-to flee, while flight was still possible. Save the royal treasures, the ritual vessels of the shrines. Seek the safety of the sea, retreat to the motherland. They could not have dreamed of the magnitude of the disaster; they could not know that Crete was also in peril.
“They crowded on board the ships, men, women, and children, with their private treasures and the most precious possessions of the state. But before they could cast off, the volcano caught them. Earthquakes, great tidal waves, showers of molten rock turned the harbor into a scene out of Dante. Some ships caught fire. The flames were quickly quenched when the vessels sank, but I tell you, there are charred ships’ timbers down below, in this very bay.
“The sunken ships were covered almost immediately by sand and ash. That is what preserved them. Throughout the succeeding millennia they remained sealed in their natural tombs. And then, by pure accident, a storm, accompanied by earth tremors, shifted those strata. The hardened ash cracked and the sands were washed away. The skeletons of the ships lay exposed as they had fallen. Only for a short time; another storm followed and again the wrecks were buried. It may be that they are gone forever. But I doubt it. I think they are still there. Of all that wreckage something must remain. It will be a long project to search the area thoroughly. I am no longer fit for such exertion. So-”
“So,” I said. “Me. It’s funny, isn’t it, that your long-lost daughter should turn out to be a diver?”
“Funny?” The cold gray eyes grew cloudy, as if they were focusing on some inner vision. “In the cosmic sense, yes; the kind of jest one might expect from a deity who excels in irony. The Olympians would enjoy such a joke. It would have suited their primitive, revengeful sense of humor. I felt at times as if they were taking a hand in my affairs. And why not? I have been so long concerned with theirs. The accident that put an end to my diving was such a jest, and its author is not hard to identify-who else but the Earthshaker, the lord of the sea, who was also the god of ancient Crete? Resenting the interloper, punishing him for intruding. And then…you. How is that to be taken, I wonder? Has the god relented, or is this the first part of another of those elaborate, childish practical jokes?”
I shivered. The water was warm, but if you stayed in too long without moving, gradually the chill got to you. It had to be the chill of the water-not my response to that eerie speech, which struck an echoing chord somewhere deep inside me.